President Donald Trump lashed out at a female reporter on Monday for asking about Ukraine as the president has given mixed messages in recent days over the war.
Trump, 79, was taking questions while seated alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the White House on Monday when he got one he did not like.
“You are the most powerful man on earth. Why don’t you just enable Ukraine to finish this war tomorrow?” asked Australian journalist Latika Bourke.
“Well, if you know anything about what you were talking about,” Trump fired back.
“I do, I do,” she quickly pushed back as Trump insisted “I don’t think you do really.”
The president argued she did not know what she was talking about because it’s “a little bit more complicated than that.”
“It sounds easy. We’re in the process of trying to make a deal. If we make a deal that’s great. If we don’t make a deal it will be a lot of people are going to be paying a big price,” Trump said.
The president’s snapping over Ukraine comes after he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin for two hours last Thursday before meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday.
The president appears to be shifting his support back toward Russia once again as Putin’s invasion rages on.
Zelensky on Friday had hoped to leave Washington with a commitment that the U.S. would provide Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine, but the president denied the request despite previously signaling an openness to it.
After Friday’s meeting, Trump posted the warring countries “should stop where they are” and both declare victory. He then told reporters they should “go by the battle line, wherever it is” and that “otherwise, it’s too complicated.”
The Financial Times reported on Sunday that the Trump-Zelensky meeting Friday actually turned into a shouting match with Trump cursing and throwing maps of the battlefield brought by Ukrainian officials aside, saying he was sick of seeing them.
On Sunday, the president repeated that the fighting should “stop at the battle lines” and claimed “78 percent” of the Donbas region had already been taken by Russia, so they can “negotiate something later down the road.”
However, after Trump spoke with Zelensky last month alongside the United Nations General Assembly, the president said Ukraine could win back all the territory it lost to Russia since the war began, but he has since backtracked on the likelihood of a Ukrainian victory.
“They could still win it. I don’t think they will, but they could still win it,” Trump said on Monday. “I never said they would win it. I said they could win—anything could happen.
After Trump spoke with Putin on Thursday, he announced the two leaders would meet a second time in person in Hungary within a couple of weeks despite their first in-person meeting in Alaska yielding almost zero progress toward ending the war.
While Trump snapped at the reporter for her question on Monday about why he had not enabled Ukraine to win the war, he did not specifically address the first part of her inquiry.
She had asked if Trump would back Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bill to designate Russia a terrorist state.
Moments before her question, the president on Monday called the war in Ukraine a “bloodbath” and claimed it was the worst casualties since World War II. However, he said it doesn’t affect the U.S. “in any way” and touted NATO paying the U.S. for weapons to provide to Ukraine.
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